The national charity for new music

International Women's Day 2019

Date:

08/03/2019

Today Sound and Music is launching a range of activities to mark International Women's Day 2019.

Over the past few years there has been a marked increase in visibility surrounding the ongoing issues around gender inequality and in particular programming in the Arts and Music sector. PRS Foundation's Keychange project has continued to gain momentum with more organisations showing a commitment to addressing these issues, and landmark initiatives such as Venus Blazing at Trinity Laban and Venus Unwrapped at Kings Place have been launched.

However, although we have seen some change, for composers and music creators there is still much more work that needs to be done.

At Sound and Music we are taking the opportunity this year to once again release our data and insights in to this year analyse how close we are to meeting the commitment we made in 2017 that "By March 2020 at least 50% of composers we work with will identify as women".

Chief Executive Susanna Eastburn MBE has written a special blog post exploring how far we've come since our initial pledge but what challenges still remain embedded across the sector for composers that identify as women.

Alongside our data, we will be profiling 31 composers from across musical genres both historical and contemporary, that have and continue to enrich, challenge and
change our musical and sonic landscape - you can see them from the 8th March on the British Music Collection as part of #aComposeraDay or follow along on our Instagram or Twitter